A common complaint I see about Intel is because they didn't have much in the way of competition from AMD for several years, they were content with releasing each new generation of processors with only "incremental" performance updates. Incremental being about 10%-15%. I wondered if in the past, we were enjoying a period of great performance improvements and so I went to looking around for benchmarks of processors from around the mid 2000s to late 2000s/early 2010s.

 

I found out that both Intel and AMD were only offering what amounted to incremental IPC improvements. Or perhaps just incremental improvements in general. The only exception was from Pentium D to Core 2.

 

Giant list of CPU reviews over the years

 

AMD Athlon 64 reviews (Compare against Athlon XP)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1164

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd,685.html

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/55510-review-athlon-64-3400

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/625-amd-athlon64-fx-51/

 

Core 2 Conroe reviews (Compare against Pentium D)

http://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/intel-core-2-duo-conroe-e6400-e6600-e6700-x6800

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2045

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/review-core-2-duo-e6600-e6700-x6800,1.html

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2097

 

AMD Phenom reviews (Compare against Athlon 64)

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/9218-amd-phenom-x4-9750-quad-core-cpu-review.html

https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/cpus/amd_phenom_x4_9850_9750_and_9550_b3_cpus/1/

http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-phenom-9900-processor-review-spider-platform_597

 

Core 2 Penryn reviews (compare against Core 2 Duo Conroe)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2306 (this is more of a preview than a real review)

http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/intel_e8400/ (Though it's a review for the C2D E8400, compare the C2Q Q9450 against the C2Q Q6600)

https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/cpus/intel_core_2_duo_e8500_e8400_and_e8200/1/

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_c2d_e8400&num=1

 

Core i5 Lynnfield reviews (compare against Core 2 Quad Penryn)

The reason why i5 is used instead of the i7 is the i7 has HyperThreading.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2832

https://www.techspot.com/review/193-intel-core-i5-750/ (Note they have an overclocked score that might through you off)

https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/cpus/intel-core-i5-and-i7-lynnfield-cpu-review/1/

 

AMD Phenom II reviews (Compare against AMD Phenom 9950 BE, but keep in mind of the 0.2GHz clock difference in favor of the Phenom II)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2702

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phenom-ii-940,2114.html

https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/cpus/amd-phenom-ii-x4-940-and-920-review/1/

 

Maybe the most damning find: This pattern may have been the norm all along

I found an article from 2003 on Tom's Hardware benchmarking CPUs from the Pentium 100MHz all the way to then contemporary Pentium 4's. All of the graphs seemed to indicate that 10%-20% IPC increases were the norm across generations of each CPU. You can read the article (starting from the test setup page) at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/benchmark-marathon,590-22.html

 

However, there are noticeable performance jumps, notably:

• Unreal Tournament 2003 does not run at even 30 FPS on Intel Pentiums and AMD K6s. However the K6-III was released around the same time as the Celeron Mendocino and I can't figure out why it performs so much better. The Celeron Mendocino was the second attempt with the on-die L2 cache, but K6-III had on-die L2 cache as well.
• Mp3 Maker Platinum and Main Concept (an MPEG-2 encoder) have huge increases in time on processors at K6-III/Celeron Mendocino and before. I would point to the programs using SSE, but AMD Athlon Thunderbird performs just fine and it doesn't have SSE.

Gathering all of this data, I think the contributors that offered the biggest improvements over the past 20 or so years has been:

• Better caching. On-die L2 saved the Celeron Mendocino.
• Better front-end improvements like what happened on the Athlon. Some more reading can be found at http://www.anandtech.com/show/355. This also massively helped Intel when going from Pentium 4/Pentium D to Core/Core 2.
• Improvements to FPU performance. This may explain AMD's performance oddities in some of the tests on older processors while Intel seemingly did not have issues.
• I think the biggest takeaway though is that clock speed has improved greatly in a short period of time, and for a while, it was the best way to get more performance out of a processor.
  • The Pentium P54C at 100 MHz was released in October of 1994. It took Intel about 6 years later in March of 2000 to release the 1GHz Pentium III. This is a clock increase of about 150MHz per year or a 1.523 times improvement per year on average.
  • In March 2000, the 1GHz AMD Athlon was released. Four years later, a 2GHz Athlon was released. This is 250 MHz per year on average, but only a 1.19 times improvement per year.
  • Intel took about 18 months between the initial 1.3GHz Pentium 4 to the first 2.6GHz Pentium 4, which is the most impressive improvement at 866.667 MHz per year.
  • But to get to 3.8GHz, the fastest yet, took about 3 years from the first 1.9GHz processor. This is about 633.333 MHz per year or 1.26 times more improvement on average.

 

And another thing to point out, in some cases like the Pentium III 500MHz vs. 1GHz may not sound like much today since 500MHz differences are common in processors, but back then it was still a 200% performance difference on the same architecture.